Pump Saga Began 10 Years Ago Revolution Shook Bucks County Part One Of A Two-part Series The Point Pleasant Pump -- 10 Years

January 11, 1993|by HAL MARCOVITZ, The Morning Call

"I guess I thought we could win it. I wouldn't have gotten involved in the first place if I didn't think that. I'm not the kind of person who goes out and does a kamikaze act that has no chance."

--Rich Myers

"I was dead set against violence or the destruction of property. If I told the authorities every time I heard someone threatening violence, I would have been betraying people all the time."

--Val Sigstedt

"The whole situation was as close to anarchy as anything I can possibly imagine."

--Andy Warren

Ten years ago, anarchy may not have come to Bucks County but revolution certainly did. Nobody in Bucks County had ever seen anything like it before and, for sure, it has never happened again. It ruined some careers and made others. It cost millions of dollars to fight and millions to defend. Dozens of people chose prison because of it.

It was the Point Pleasant Pumping Station.

On Jan. 10, 1983, just past 8 a.m., a lone pickup truck driven by a county official attempted to drive onto a property along River Road in Point Pleasant. The truck was met by more than 2,000 demonstrators who turned it back and refused to step aside. A day later, the police waded into the crowd, arresting dozens of demonstrators. By the end of the week hundreds of people had been taken into custody to clear the way for bulldozers, cranes and other heavy construction equipment needed to construct the pump.

That summer many of the protesters would be serving jail terms.

By the end of the year, Bucks County would have a new government.

But on that first day, the construction company was turned back and for 24 hours a ragtag group of protesters wrote their own laws and took over the tiny village of Point Pleasant.

Says protest leader Val Sigstedt: "This was a place of almost religious importance to a lot of people; it represented their psychological home. They felt it was the battle of the century."

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Plans for the $100 million water supply project had been on and off the drawing boards since the early 1960s. It was designed to supply water from the Delaware River to drought-prone communities in Bucks and Montgomery counties. Also, at the time the Point Pleasant water project was being designed, Philadelphia Electric Co. proposed to build its own pumping station further north on the river with the idea of providing cooling water to the planned Limerick nuclear power plant.

Instead of approving both projects, state and federal regulatory agencies recommended that the two pumping stations be combined for the dual purpose of providing cooling water to Limerick and drinking water to Bucks and Montgomery counties.

The result was the Point Pleasant water project. It would include the pumping station in Point Pleasant, a nearby reservoir, a network of pipelines throughout the two counties and a water treatment plant in Chalfont. It would draw up to 95 million gallons of water a day from the river.

During the late 1960s, bond issues were floated to build the sprawling project and land was purchased for the components. Nevertheless, it wasn't until after the election of 1979 that definitive steps were taken to launch the plan.

Bucks County Commissioners Andrew L. Warren and Elaine P. Zettick had campaigned that year on a commitment to build the water project. Strangely, it wasn't much of a campaign issue and the two Republicans easily won election. The Democratic candidates had no firm position on the project, owing largely to the fact that a prior Democratic administration in the courthouse had supported Point Pleasant.

Soon after taking office in 1980, Warren and Zettick signed the contracts to build the water system and the final plans were made. Slowly, though, opposition surfaced.

Sigstedt, a stained-glass artist living in Point Pleasant, was one of the first opponents of the project. He started attending meetings of the county commissioners and speaking out against the project, claiming that it was environmentally unsound and that it would lead to massive development in the region. He was soon joined by others. Out of that group of opponents, which prior to 1983 never numbered more than a few dozen, the organization Del-AWARE was born. Sigstedt became the first chairman.

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"Point Pleasant was like a boil on your backside; you did something about it. It was too bad a thing to let go on, you just had to do something about it. You couldn't get involved in it without knowing you were right. In politics, you get red lights and green lights and yellow lights. We got green lights wherever we looked. By the time it was over, there was a general feeling among the people who supported us that we weren't wrong."

--Val Sigstedt

"When I first read about the pump, I thought, `Why do we have to make it even easier to develop the area?'"

--Rich Myers

"I'll never forgive them for the absolutely blatant falsifying of information."